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Comment by cjensen | Hacker News Reader

The article says that manufacturers are not allowed to list sesame as an ingredient unless it actually is an ingredient.

The law says they can't warn about potential sesame contamination. Instead it must either be an actual ingredient or manufacturers must clean the equipment.

Seems like this fiasco could have been avoided if someone had gone and talked to manufacturers about how big a deal it would be to clean stuff. I'm guessing this isn't a question of a small amount of profit loss; it's probably a big expensive deal to comply with this law.

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> The article says that manufacturers are not allowed to list sesame as an ingredient unless it actually is an ingredient.

Correct. I wasn't suggesting adding it to the ingredients list.

> The law says they can't warn about potential sesame contamination.

The law does not say that. It says that manufacturers can't do that instead of following standard cleaning practices.

> Instead it must either be an actual ingredient or manufacturers must clean the equipment.

Yes, they must clean the equipment. None of this is new stuff, this has been the case for many years.

Why is it suddenly too much of a burden for food manufacturers to clean their equipment? Is wanting to avoid cleaning not a huge red flag about that manufacturer?

> I'm guessing this isn't a question of a small amount of profit loss; it's probably a big expensive deal to comply with this law.

Knowing large corporations, I'm guessing that the economics of it aren't the real issue at all. If it costs substantially more, they'd just add a few cents to the cost of the food.

Cleaning equipment is expensive, and results in significant downtime. Plus in any manufacturing process for a commodity good, you really want a process that is as continuous as possible - any disruption might even cause some equipment wear.

Also, there's a limit to which you can price extra, a limit of what a customer would be willing to pay for it, VS look for a substitute product.

> Cleaning equipment is expensive, and results in significant downtime

Of course. So what?

> there's a limit to which you can price extra

How much extra do you think they'd have to charge? I don't know, myself. Given the volume commercial facilities tend to do, I would be shocked if it even adds as much as a dime to the price.

> look for a substitute product

Ideally, these rules would apply to all such companies, so no company would have any sort of cost advantage over the others as a result of this.

The problem here is simple greed, leading some manufacturers to engage in cruel shenanigans in order to maintain a sliver of their profit margin.

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